Google Workspace is introducing more features to boost collaboration and communication for remote and hybrid workers.

Workspace is Google’s productivity suite and includes tools such as Gmail, Sheets, Tasks and Docs. It replaced G Suite in October 2020. The tech giant has made several improvements to the service over the past few months to serve users who were working remotely or in hybrid settings.

Today’s new features announcement includes in-meeting emoticon reactions, new integrations and automatic noise cancellation privacy tools for Google Meet.

The company is also rolling out Google Voice to new users and improving functions on Google Spaces. The latter was launched last September to allow colleagues to share projects and collaborate virtually.

Google Spaces

At the time of the announcement last year, Google said it expected to introduce a discoverability tool to Spaces in the future. Today Google said it would be introducing inline threading to Spaces following requests from its enterprise customers. The feature will enable members of a space to respond to specific comments and create side conversations. Every teammate can easily browse a space and catch up on topics that are relevant to them, at a time that works for their schedule.

Last week, Google enabled users to invite others to join a Space via a shared link. Later in the year, it will let users search and join Spaces across an organisation. Team size limits for Spaces will also be increased to 8,000 initially and later to 25,000 to support teams of all sizes.

Google Meet

As it unveiled Spaces last September, Google said that Meet users would soon be able to avail of a ‘companion mode’, which lets people join meetings from their personal devices while leveraging in-room audio and video. The company has begun rolling out noise cancellation to remove background noise.

Google is also making improvements to its livestream experience. Meet users can now host meetings of up to 500 active attendees with the ability to livestream to audiences of up to 100,000 trusted Workspace domains. Later in the year, meeting hosts will be able to stream meetings directly to YouTube from the Meet activities tab as Google is integrated with YouTube.

To make interaction between virtual Meet attendees and their colleagues working onsite, the latter group will be able to add their own personal video tile from Companion mode and their laptop camera, making it easier for other attendees to see their expressions and gestures.

From next month, Meet users will be able to see their audiences while presenting on the platform as Google is bringing picture-in-picture to Meet running on Chrome browsers. It will be possible for presenters to see up to four video tiles of meeting attendees in a floating window on top of other applications as they share content. They can click on the picture-in-picture feature to return to the Meet session in full screen mode.

In May, Google will roll out optional client-side encryption in Google Meet. The feature, which is currently in beta, will give users direct control of the encryption keys and identity provider used to access those keys. Optional end-to-end encryption for all meetings will be introduced later this year.

Google Voice

Finally, Google Workspace has also announced improvements to its Google Voice tool for customers. Later in 2022, Google will enable customers with operations outside its current coverage areas to move holistically to Google Voice. Admins will be able to manage carrier-provided numbers alongside Google-provisioned numbers directly in the Google Admin Console. This measure is designed to help Google’s European customers adopt Google Voice. From last month, calls from European Google Voice numbers to mobile and landline numbers in many European countries are included with the cost of the Google Voice license and are no longer subject to international and domestic rates.

The tech company is also set to begin rolling out on-demand call recording to Google Voice Standard and Premier subscribers next month. Premier subscribers will have the additional benefit of automated call recordings, which is a top request from customers in regulated industries.

These latest additions to the Google Workspace suite come shortly after Google announced details of its own hybrid work policy, which will see most workers begin to work in the office at least three days per week from 4 April.

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